Abstract
Lured by the promise of effective and efficient journalism, some newsrooms have allowed themselves to be overtaken by the corporate needs of dominant digital platforms that provide metrics-driven technologies. The proliferation of audience metrics has undoubtedly affected journalistic cultures, especially the norms, values, and practices at the core of news production. Yet, although there has been a recent uptick in literature that addresses journalists’ decision-making versus web metrics’ standardized methods of maximizing web traffic, few scholars have analyzed metrics as a form of labor discipline.
This is precisely what Petre, an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, does in All the News, an ethnographic study of how popularity-driven metrics affect contemporary journalism and news production, aptly illustrated by thick descriptions of her fieldwork at the New York Times, Gawker Media, and Chartbeat.
Under the core argument that “newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline” (p. 6), Petre exhibits no shyness in this book’s scope. All the News is divided into three comprehensive sections that highlight various issues, from how journalists experience metrics and understand them to how they mobilize metrics and manage journalistic labor.
The book begins by deep-diving into Petre’s fieldwork stories from Gawker, the company known for its gossipy celebrity coverage and aggressive usage of audience performance metrics. The author deals with how journalists experience metrics, portraying how analytical tools like Chartbeat are “designed to engineer journalists’ consent to labour discipline while still leaving intact their cherished sense of professional autonomy” (p. 49). Petre observes that as journalists allow their self-professed fixations to increase on these technologies, the promise of professional autonomy becomes ever more illusory. Furthermore, the endless feedback loops to which professional journalists succumb translate into changes in newsroom social relations, expectations for increased productivity, and a new operating logic in journalism.
Petre then describes the complexity of interpreting the ambiguity of audience metrics. Journalists and editors are no longer oblivious to the individual performance of each news article. Instead, “it is not lost on journalists that the frames used to interpret traffic . . . are highly influential in shaping managerial perceptions of how effective they are at their jobs” (p. 103). Still, what counts as a perceived good or a bad story—based on metrics—remains shrouded in interpretative ambiguity from the journalists’ perspective. Even now, when newsrooms wallow in audience data, it is not always possible to know why a specific story succeeds or fails in terms of popularity-driven metrics. As Petre states, “data points don’t come with particular take-aways attached” (p. 138).
Toward the book’s closing chapters, the conversation shifts to data containment or how editors, in managing journalistic labor, attempt to control journalists’ consumption of metrics. Drawing from fieldwork at the Times, Petre delves into the ongoing debate between editors’ sense of judgment regarding news and the affordances of digital media that demand a more decentralized decision-making structure within newsrooms.
The book’s predominant strength is Petre’s distillation of her ethnographic fieldwork at the New York Times, Gawker Media, and Chartbeat into a behind-the-scenes look into the prevailing uncertainty and constant changes that audience metrics produce in journalism practice, values, and ideals. Importantly, Petre avoids a deterministic approach when examining audience analytics. Indeed, she quickly notes that “while metrics have not caused the news industry’s financial woes, neither have they cured them” (p. 183). Instead, metrics are a symptom “of relentless and intensifying economic pressures” (p. 183). Overworked and overwhelmed journalists are witnessing the standardization of work that was once rationalized. In a never-ending chase to maximize traffic and web revenues, media organizations have traded quality journalism for click-counting metrics.
This book certainly addresses how metrics and traffic-tracking technologies have transformed the journalistic labor process; however, future research could further expand on the digital platforms’ role in this context, as they have created new market models for newsrooms to communicate with their audience. Consequently, platform giants determine who that audience is before the media even have a chance to measure them. When all is said and done, All the News is a welcome contribution to the current debate about the future of legacy and online-only news outlets.